Independence Day: Resurgence - Quietly Into the Night

I am not a wise man.  I like a lot of bad things.  More specifically I’ve enjoyed many a bad movie.  I’ve sat and thought to myself, “Dear god this is garbage,” and yet watched through to the credits being sufficiently amused by a film’s deficiencies to compensate for the overall failure of the attempt.  I did it with Wing Commander, I did it with Battleship and I did it with Batman and Robin.  But this doesn’t preclude the simple fact that they are bad movies.  Their directors creating freaks that we point and laugh at as opposed to visions of narrative and thespian beauty.  

We forgive you for After Earth, come back!

So, the question becomes when faced with such an abomination, was I entertained even if for the wrong reasons?  Was I amused or was I robbed?  Independence Day: Resurgence faced just such a quandary.  Following on from Roland Emmerich’s now two-decade old tour-de-force it was a questionable enterprise right out of the gate.  Minus Will Smith and having to capture the attention of a whole new generation of movie goers it had an uphill battle against the likes of modern blockbusters that dominate the box office.  A world of tie ins, sequels and what has become in no small part an exercise in brand recognition.  As such, I went into Resurgence with my fingers crossed that we were going to see alien invasions kicking it old school with some modern tropes, but still holding a core forged from the original.  But that’s not what happened. That’s not what happened at all.

         

Here on the Internet we’re prone to the extreme opinions and reviews of the masses.  Sometimes the vitriol is justified and often it’s not, but usually the truth falls somewhere in the middle.  So when I say that Independence Day: Resurgence is bad, I want you to understand something.  It's bad in a way that is not funny.  If anything it's borderline tragic with hints of pity and despair.  It's the Gulf of Tonkin incident without the amusing deception and decade long war.  In summary dear reader, it's a bad kind of bad.  So, what went wrong?

                 

Pod people.

First of all, the flesh puppets...  I mean actors.  Alien invasion movies are straight forward affairs with plenty of A to B writing.  That’s no bad thing, for a tight story with the right script can be great, much like the original Independence Day.  It allows for maximum  explosions and just the right amount of character development.  As we don’t want characters we don’t give a damn about but equally we don’t want to be flipping through their family albums while all the cool stuff happens off camera.  Resurgence however, falls into the former category; so much so that neither I nor my friend could remember any of the new characters’ names come the credits.  Not a one.  Nada.  Liam Hemsworth remained Liam Hemsworth; not Will Smith (no matter how desperately they wished otherwise) remained not Will Smith and Bill Pullman, somehow, was not President Whitmore.  In point of fact the only new character that achieved their purpose was the Chinese pilot played by Angelababy (stage name), who doubtless helped draw cinemagoers in the ever more lucrative Asian markets.  There’s even a line to the effect of, “China has been the most important partner in developing our super anti-alien defences,” thrown in near the beginning.  It’s so transparent that unless English is your second language, you’ll flinch when you see it. 

                                  

Bigger ship, bigger fun.

As for the narrative itself it’s uninspired but not fatal alone.  The aliens come back, other aliens show up and declare themselves the enemy of the original aliens and war ensues.  Then things fall down.  For we are shown/told all of this in forced exposition that feels so disconnected from the first movie it’s hard to see how one leads to two.  The invaders are now lead by “Harvester Queens” and only by killing this Alien knockoff can they be thwarted, although it has never been done before!  Apart from last time when they nuked the sons of bitches.  But that’s semantics.  After this we’re subjected to a very familiar set of events.  The humans are overwhelmed, the alien ship lands, the humans launch a daring but ultimately doomed assault on the now 3000 kilometres sized mothership before defeating them at Area 51 just in the nick of time.  It was almost like paying one’s entry fee to see a favourite film performed by second-rate actors.  That was nice; I was too young to see the original at the cinema. 

                                        

The family underachiever.

The stinking, putrid glue that holds it all together is the script.  For without one it’s just a bunch of people gesturing dramatically and dying without context.  In hindsight, this may have been an improvement, but you live and learn.  Remember those modern tropes that we mentioned earlier?  Well they’re present, albeit in their worst possible forms.  I’m talking about the quips.  The unending, unfunny and unrelenting quips that are so desperately ill-judged at times it makes you wonder at Emmerich’s sanity.  The great thing about the original was that while it was funny (“Welcome to Earth!”) it was also plausible.  That the characters were saying one-liners and mouthing off as a coping mechanism for the fact the entire world was ending around them.  It’s what people do.  Admittedly sometimes a one-liner is just a one-liner, but they never felt misplaced.  In Resurgence however, I didn’t laugh once.  No one in the audience did either.  It was offensive, it was juvenile and best summed up by Liam Hemsworth whipping his dick out to take a piss as to distract a bunch of aliens.  He was talking at the time which made it even worse.

                                                 

I could go on for another five pages documenting this movies sins but by the time I’d finish it would be an inquiry ten years in the making.  An entire dissertation could be squandered on the terrible effects alone before running a financial breakdown on what exactly they spent that 165 million dollars on.  Other than the nine writers who “contributed” to the films creation of course, which goes some way towards explaining the horrendously fractured narrative.  But I digress.  For there is only one message you should take away from this review and that is stay away.  Hide.  Take shelter.  Independence Day: Resurgence is an atrocity not only for its violation of a classic, but because it took everything wrong with the current mega-movie industry and distilled it into something more unwatchable than Transformers: Age of Extinction.  Sadly, there’s no such thing as a cinematic crime against humanity, so if you need me that’s where I’ll be.  At The Hague, protesting for one.

A Comparative Assessment of an Unfunny Story

Book to film conversions. Some are certainly more successful than others and I don't mean financially. The Harry Potter series for instance generally languishes in the so-so department while stories such as Eragon are damn near villainous in their portrayal. A bad script, poor direction and Edward, fucking, Spleers. The guy was obviously chosen as a pretty face, not for his abilities. Now, when dealing with sensitive topics such as mental illness I cannot say one medium is superior over another, however in this case a clear distinction exists. It's Kind of a Funny Story is a tale centring on Craig, a teenager for whom the rigours of life have finally become too much, and he ends up on a 30 day psychiatric hold in Six North.  Let's say it's a quirky place for quirky people. In the book his personality, his dreams and the failings of his psyche are developed with keen interest. They help us to understand that Craig's life is not the sole reason behind his unhappiness, alluding to the chemical issues at work in ones brain while depressed. And this is a book aimed at teenagers. It educates as well as aids in both understanding and dealing with depression, and quite frankly, the film fails miserably.

DVD Cover: It's Kind of a Funny Story

Keir Gilchrist, our resident Craig is problematic to begin with, but we'll get to him. No, the central issue with the movie is the way in which it pulls away from depression being an illness and rather a single manifestation of Craig's oh-so difficult life. I would like to say here that I am in no way saying that problems within ones life cannot lead to depression, but rather this departure from the book is unforgivable. While in the novel Craig's family is supportive and entirely dedicated to his getting better, the film gives us a dysfunctional and emotionally distant unit, possessing an overbearing dad and a useless mother, acted by the poorly used Lauren Graham. It seems like the directors, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck were desperate to show that his depression was firmly rooted in reality, as heaven forbid, we don't want people to think it's an actual illness anyone could get. That could cause a panic.

 I'm sad and stuff.  (Sigh) Depression is hard. 
The entire escapade is further damaged by the directors irritating take on Craig as a character. You see, in the novel Craig isn't cutting his wrists and weeping to some two bit love ballad, he's more subtly askew. It makes him easier to relate to and strikes a decent balance between the unavoidable darker sides and moments of humorous levity. Sure he throws up and can't keep his food down, however this is tempered by Craig's amusing observations and peculiar world. The directors in their haste seem to lose sight of this nuance, making Craig into a rather insufferable little sod in the process. A poster child for electro shock therapy if ever there was one, he comes across as moody, shallow and downright dull. I understand that the film was supposed to be up lifting, but it would have been also rather nice had Craig exhibited any of the other symptoms common with depression. Other than his obligatory throwing up we are given no real indicators that he is unhappy, apart from being an arse throughout the movie. This is of course then compounded by declaring his love for his best friends ex girlfriend as to sleep with her, while also standing in front of the girl who was supposed to be his love interest. And said love interest hooks up with him anyway. Interesting the way in which Boden and Fleck took the moment of the book designed to inspire and fill teenagers with a sense of all will come right, and instead made Craig appear to be a Herculean, cheating scum bag.

                                                                                    Zach Galifianakis says what?                 
The supporting cast just doesn't seem to exist, comprising a series of peculiar characters who are never developed. Even Bobby, the head patient as it were, played by Zach Galifianakis feels more like a peripheral character, his problems boiled down to a difficult relationship with his child. It's far from the rich and plain quirky characters in play in the book, if anything they seem like cut outs of Ned Vizzini's creations, placed their to help us all bask in the greatness of Craig's tragic life.

                            
 Now, considering that this article is veering heavily in the direction of a rant, I shall conclude my slightly comparative musings with a final nod to a fine book and a terrible film. If I could describe it as anything, I would say it's flat, dreary and wholly misses the point of the story by languishing with Craig, and only Craig. A boy so uninteresting he made me pine for Charlie, the over the top creation from The Perks of Being a Wallflower. If you've read my review of that particular work, you'll know of the hefty disdain I feel for young Charlie, but this pales into insignificance in comparison to It's Kind of a Funny Story, the movie.